My Brother Didn’t Speak to Me for 25 Years. His Will Left Me Half of His Maine Blueberry Farm, and a Partner I’d Never Met

My name is Frank Delaney. I’m 63 years old, a retired accountant from Montclair, New Jersey.

For forty years, I lived a careful life. I balanced other people’s books. I filed their tax returns. I told them how much to put in their retirement accounts and how to avoid estate taxes.

I was good at it. I was good at keeping things in order.

Except my own family.

My younger brother, Patrick, and I stopped speaking at our father’s funeral in 2000. It started over the house, and who should get it, and turned into everything else. Twenty years of resentment came out in one afternoon in a church parking lot.

He said I’d always been Dad’s favorite. I said he’d always been a quitter.

He moved to Maine the next year. I never called. Neither did he.

Last September, a lawyer named Harold Gray called me from a town called Cherryfield, Maine.

Patrick had died of a heart attack. He was 59.

And I was in his will.